Posts for : October 2015

Q: How do you get different species of wood to look the same after staining

A: Read Below and then call Complete Custom Painting: 651-336-0561

Recently we had a job in a very nice house where in a french door was made of Red Oak and the jamb and casing were white oak. This all butted up to white oak baseboard which had already been finished (more than 10 years ago). So the question was, how to get the white oak to match the existing white oak, and then make the read oak match also. Below are some pictures and an explanation of how it turned out: Here is a white oak jamb and casing but the door is read oak. I had two samples made and was carrying two types of stain. You can see that the read oak appears darker (more red of course) so I thinned it and it matched much better.

In this picture I used the the same two stains but put them on different items. You can see that the red oak is now extremely red compared to the white and the white oak, is a little too light. I scrapped this match but added a little of it to the other stain when I applied it to the white oak. I didn’t use any of it on the red (it would have been way too red).

Here is the Read Oak French Door next to an existing door that was White Oak but was in the house for 15 years or better. Extremely close match and the varnish isn’t on it yet. (after the varnish it should be spot on).

Here is the casing, jamb and french door. 2 types of stains were applied and it was thinned down dramatically when applied to the red oak to make sure it wasn’t too dark. This is before the Sealer and Varnish were applied so the amber effect will make it match exactly. While red oak will not ever be exactly the same as white oak (because the idea of stain is to see through to the wood and allow the woods natural color to come through the transparent color of the stain you are going to have different looks from species to species and board to board. Depending on how opaque the stain is you can make it match. The more transparent, the more likely you are to see the difference. However by using 2 types of stains and knowing which colors will mute out certain tones you can get even different species of wood to match pretty well.